They Counted Me Like Cargo, So I Took the War novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Watchtower

The bolt took Garrow in the shoulder an hour before dark, through the window, and spun him round against the wall.

He sat down hard and looked at the shaft sticking out of him.

"Well," he said. "That's annoying."

Corvus was on his knees beside him before he'd finished saying it.

"Seren, tell him to leave it in," Garrow said. "He listens to you now."

Seren knelt on Garrow's other side and pressed his folded cloak around the shaft, and Garrow swore at both of them in a steady stream that Seren took as a good sign.

They had twenty-two men who could stand.

The enemy had forty knights on the road and maybe sixty Caerwen archers on the slope.

They only needed to wait until the tower was too thirsty to hold a bow.

Seren went to the window, keeping low, and looked down.

The two camps had lit fires as the light went.

The black knights were on the road. The Caerwen men were on the scree above it.

There was a good hundred yards between them, and nobody had walked across it.

They didn't share a fire.

They were two packs of dogs set on the same rabbit, and neither trusted the other not to take the rabbit home.

"Corvus," Seren said. "How long can you be quiet going down those steps?"

Corvus looked up from Garrow.

"Why?"

"Because I'm going to make a lot of noise up here."

Seren waited for full dark.

Then he leaned out of the window and shouted down the slope in the voice his tutors had spent ten years making carry across a hall.

"Caerwen!"

The fires on the scree went quiet.

"You're Highcourt men! I know your boots! Has the regent paid you yet?"

"He paid the Varran king's guard in gold this morning. I watched him do it at the ford."

That was a lie, and he told it like scripture.

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